Just 48 hours after the onset of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the British government devised a propaganda campaign to downplay the severity of the crisis, a talking point that was hastily parroted by leading global warming alarmist George Monbiot.

“Internal emails seen by the Guardian[1] show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK,” reports Rob Edwards[2].

“We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear,” wrote one official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith labeled the complicity between the government and the nuclear industry in downplaying the crisis “appalling,” while Greenpeace’s Louise Hutchins said the emails provided evidence of “scandalous collusion”.

“Anti-nuclear people across Europe have wasted no time blurring this all into Chernobyl and the works,” said the BIS official in another email. “We need to quash any stories trying to compare this to Chernobyl.”

While this PR blitz was being coordinated, we now know that the Japanese government was deliberately lying about the severity of the radiation release from Fukushima in an effort to conceal the fact that the crisis was already on a par with Chernobyl.

Within just two weeks of the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the nuclear plant, the amount of radiation released from Fukushima already rivaled that of Chernobyl[3], the worst nuclear disaster up until that point.

The government’s public relations campaign to downplay the severity of the crisis was enthusiastically parroted by many quarters of the man-made global warming crowd, eager as they were to not let focus slip away from the deadly threat posed by the life-giving gas carbon dioxide, to the point where people like George Monbiot almost went so far as to characterize radiation as harmless and nutritious.

In the days and weeks after Fukushima, Monbiot, perhaps Britain’s foremost global warming alarmist, wrote a series of articles for the Guardian[7] in which he made accusations that others had “wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution”.

“As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology,” wrote Monbiot.

Monbiot’s rhetoric, in addition to the British government’s efforts to downplay the crisis, serve as a stark reminder that many leading environmentalists don’t give a damn about real threats to the environment, preferring instead to spend all their time obsessing about carbon dioxide emissions and thinking up new ways to exploit global warming fearmongering as a means of controlling every aspect of our lives.

This is an agenda enthusiastically pushed by the British government, which routinely works in consort with big think tanks to promote PR campaigns aimed at rescuing the anthropogenic climate change myth, about which Brits are becoming increasingly skeptical.